About the desk

Who we are

The Quiet Index started in home, say so, and the rest of us would either try it or ignore it entirely. After a while the arguments got long enough that writing them down seemed less effort than repeating them, and this site is what came of that. There is no newsroom, no masthead full of titles and no attempt to sound like one. There are a few of us, we play on phones we already own, and whoever played the game writes the entry.

We are hobbyists, and we would rather say so than pretend to authority we do not have. Taste is taste. When we put one game above another, that is a judgement made against criteria we have published, by people who sat with both — it is not a measurement, and we do not present it as one.

How the shortlist happens

Games arrive the ordinary way: something is mentioned, somebody installs it, and it either survives a week of real use or it quietly disappears from the conversation. The survivors go on a shortlist. When the shortlist has enough in it to be worth sorting, we sort it against the three criteria on our method page and publish the result as an edition.

We do not chase new releases for their own sake. A game that came out years ago and still works well on a phone you can afford is more useful to a reader than something released last Thursday that nobody has lived with yet. We also do not claim to be exhaustive. There are hundreds of thousands of games on the store; we have opened a very small number of them, and the ranking says so by being short.

Why one ranking, updated in editions

Publishing one list at a time keeps us honest. If everything is a separate article with its own score, nothing ever has to be compared to anything, and a score can drift upward for years without anyone noticing. A single ordered page forces the comparison: to move a game up we have to say which game it passed and why. When the ranking changes, the reasoning changes with it in the entry itself.

The cadence is irregular by design. An edition goes up when there is something worth saying, not because a calendar said so. Between editions we make interim changes if a game ships a significant update, alters how it charges, or stops running well on ordinary hardware.

Independence

Nothing on this site is for sale. There is no paid placement, no sponsored entry, no affiliate arrangement behind the links, and no way for a developer to buy a position or a score. We take nothing from developers — not products, not access, not payment. If that ever changes, it will be stated plainly on this page before anything else changes.

The Quiet Index is also entirely independent of Google. We reference Google Play because that is where the games we cover are published and where you go to see current prices, permissions and availability. Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google LLC, and this publication is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google LLC.

Corrections

We get things wrong. When we do, the correction goes into the entry it belongs to, with the date, rather than being tidied away. A misread review count, a mechanic described badly, a game that changed after we wrote about it — all of it is worth telling us about, and the fastest way is the contact page.

The legal bit

The Quiet Index is published by Quiet Index Media LLC. Editorial enquiries and corrections go to the desk through the contact page, and we read everything that arrives, even when the answer takes a while.